If you’ve got 20 mins time and haven’t watched it yet, do it: Plastic Bag by Ramin Bahrani, voice by Werner Herzog. Song six from Queen’s A Kind of Magic came to my mind. And an answer to the question posed therein. Anyway, have a look:

I had a portable prezi (ZIP with app/exe and a couple of files and folders included) on my harddisk and wanted to use it as a basis for a new prezi. The presentation was not in my prezi account as I had to delete it for the lack of space in the free version. Back when I saved it on my harddisk, I had no subscription of Prezi, so that saving it as PEZ file did not appear worthwhile. Well, there I was with a ZIP file and no way of neither uploading it to Prezi nor of opening it in Prezi desktop.

How to convert then?

Step 1: Unzip the ZIP file (if you haven’t unzipped it for use already).
Step 2: Within the folder created by unzipping the file, there is a folder named “content”. Within this folder, there is a folder named “data”. Rename the folder “data” to “prezi”.
Step 3: Open your terminal window and go to the parent folder of “prezi”–which is “content”. You can do this by typing “cd ” (note the space after “cd”) into the command line in terminal and then dragging and dropping the folder “content” into the terminal window. Press enter.
Step 4: Use the command “zip -r0 convertedprezi.pez prezi” (that’s a numerical digit zero in the “-r” option). “convertedprezi.pez” is the file name of the file you want to create. You can give it a different name, of course. By executing this command, you are creating a zip folder without compression. If you don’t want to use the terminal or use an operation system other than OS X, use the tool, you normally use to create ZIP files without compression (this point is important: no compression!).
Step 5: There is no step five. You are done. You can open the file in Prezi Desktop now and upload it into your Prezi account from there. Everything without guarantee and at your own risk. Make a backup to be on the safe side.

Simple, isn’t it? Now, I wonder why the Prezi developers don’t seem to be willing to include an import function for these portable Prezis into Prezi Desktop.

Does it work for you? Are you experiencing difficulties with this conversion? Please, leave a comment.

Just the other day, I talked to a collegue about the problems of reading ebooks and couldn’t give the details about the books that disappeared from Kindle devices overnight. … Maria Konnikova’s article about the rewriting of the publishing history of Jonah Lehrer’s _Imagine_ adds another perspective to it…

“An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces. There’s no need of inciting mass cooperation in book-burning enterprises. No need for secret police or raids or extensive surveillance. The power to remove a book from a device, to remove all traces of it from retailers’ websites, to expunge it from a publisher’s online record: It would simplify the work of a would-be Soviet Union or Oceania multifold, would it not? It’s ugly. For all kinds of reasons.”

PS: And by the way: This is another reason to warn you again: Do not trust the cloud!

[“Alcalá de Henares”, 2012-10-06. This is a scaled down section of the image. Click picture to see the whole panorama.]

Alcalá seems to be very close here. However, it was a two hours walk from the place where I am staying as you cannot cross the river at the barrage of the Henares to access the hill/mountain. That’s my suggestion for city development: Build a bridge and an escalator from New Alcalá and the place will be teeming with people. Well, maybe not. There weren’t many people at the enchanting water front or the meadows of the flood plain. Oh, if you look carefully, you’ll notice the high-rise buildings on the horizon. This is Madrid.